What My Body Was Trying To Tell Me Through Burnout: The Story About How I Finally Learned to Listen

When My Body Finally Said “Enough”

A few years ago, my body started breaking down—and no one could explain why.

Of course, it was 2020. We were still in the heart of the pandemic, and a number of compounding factors had taken my already-intense stress levels to a state I had never experienced before—one that even my functionally-disconnected nervous system couldn’t sweep under the rug anymore.

I was sick constantly. Antibiotics had become a monthly routine, and the side effects were creating new cycles of problems. My sleep was fragmented, my digestion unreliable, and my brain… fogged.

I had always been the kind of person who would power through. I’d built a career doing it—staying focused on the output, sacrificing my downtime, proud of what I always managed to deliver despite pressure. But suddenly, even 30 minutes on a spin bike—my go-to for stress management—stopped being an option. My body just couldn’t do it anymore.

That was the moment I realised: this wasn’t about willpower anymore. Something deeper was going on.

The Search for Answers

When doctors couldn’t help me in meaningful ways, my determined problem-solver took over. If there was a solution out there, surely I could find it.

At the time, I was actually investigating a career transition into data science—I loved patterns, logic, and knew how to fix broken systems with my eyes closed. So naturally, I approached my health collapse the same way: like a problem that simply needed the right model and diagnostics.

But the deeper I went into the biology of stress, the clearer it became that I was dealing with an issue where emerging science was describing newly-understood relationships and mechanisms drastically different to what previous medical models had assumed.

There is so much to the body’s intelligence that we’ve underestimated. And many of our modern afflictions seem to stem from the fact that our high-stress lifestyles deny the body the platform and support it needs to operate its own sophisticated, self-regulating, and self-healing systems.

The question, I realised, should never have been “Why am I not coping?” It was always meant to be “What is my body trying to tell me?”

Completing the Emotional Cycle

But back to early 2021, when I listened to a podcast where Brené Brown interviewed Emily and Amelia Nagoski about their book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.

That conversation was a paradigm shift for me. For the first time, I heard emotions described as something more than abstract concepts and smiley face charts. They explained that emotions are in fact physically observable internal phenomena, leaving real chemical traces in the body. I was stunned. So was Brené.

They went on to explain that emotions are biological processes—cycles designed to carry us from a state of activation back to safety. But when those cycles are interrupted, when we push through, suppress, or rationalise instead of feeling, the body never receives the signal that the threat has ended.

“You have to complete the cycle,” they said. “Otherwise your body believes the threat is still there.”

That idea reframed everything. My body wasn’t betraying me—it was protecting me. It was still running the same emergency programs I had ignored for years.

It also introduced me to the notion that unprocessed emotions were somehow stored.

The Turning Point: Traditional Chinese Medicine

Those realisations opened a door. I began wondering whether there was a way to "defragment" all the "cached tears and anger" that sounded like they had become stuck somewhere in my body. And eventually, it led me to something that changed everything, and just in the nick of time: Traditional Chinese Medicine.

My acupuncturist, in many ways, saved my life. By that stage, the warning smoke was a full blown house fire. Over six months, to my surprise, he brought back a part of me I had started to think would be gone forever. He helped bring my body back to a place where I could sleep again. My brain began to clear. And to my further surprise, even the gut issues and endometriosis that had developed over a decade of chronic stress began to ease (despite having been told by my Doctors that symptom management was the best I could hope to achieve).

This was my first genuine experience of relief—and the first time I understood that healing isn’t just about removing symptoms. It’s about restoring harmony, because harmony is in fact our natural state. And that this state is guided by something beyond what our eyes can see.

TCM taught me to see the body not as a set of mechanical parts, but as an ecosystem of energy, movement, and intelligence. It was this shift that inspired me to continue exploring the world of energy healing—and, inevitably, to examine the emotional patterns that had created the imbalance in the first place.

From Data to Energy

Over the years that followed, I continued researching—but also exploring the purposes and functions of feeling, where patterns come from, and where in the world those unresolved emotions could be going. I discovered fascia, the nervous system, trauma science, and the ancient systems that understood the bridge between mind and body long before modern language caught up.

Science is now validating what those systems have always taught: that chronic stress, unresolved emotion, and energetic stagnation are different expressions of the same imbalance.

Where Western biology sees dysregulated cortisol, inflammation, and leaky gut, Chinese Medicine sees qi unable to flow freely through the meridians, causing predictable patterns of dysfunctions. Different languages—same truth.

And that’s what energy work, Reiki, sound therapy, and flower essences aim to support: rebalancing the body’s natural flow so that it can remember what it already knows how to do—heal.

Why I Do What I Do Now

When I eventually stepped away from my former career path, some people were surprised.

After all, I had once attended a team event dressed as a Vlookup (excel joke).

But what I had discovered made it impossible to go back.

Just this past week, a woman thanked me with tears in her eyes because the drops I recommended quieted her self-criticism so much, it allowed her to realise that it was her mother's voice she was hearing in the first place, not her own. Another client sent a gift after a Reiki session where, she told me, a 2-year headache had disappeared the day following our session and not since returned. And a third messaged to say she’s finally had the confidence to start driving again—something that had kept her isolated for years.

These are the moments that remind me why I do this. Because there is a version of me that never would have known these options existed—that not only is healing from deep patterns and burnout possible, when done using energy it can be gentle, revelatory, and profoundly effective. We just need to stop fighting the messages our body is trying to send.

Conclusion

It took me years to understand that burnout wasn’t a personal failure. It was my body begging for me to listen. If I could go back to that version of me — the one holding it all together while falling apart inside — this is what I would like to tell her:

1. The reason you feel angry is because you’re abandoning yourself out of a sense of duty.

2. Suppressing emotions doesn’t make them go away. It just makes them louder in another language.

3. If you need coffee to function… then you aren’t functioning.

4. Life doesn’t have to be this way.

What is your future self waiting to tell you?